A couple 1 of people have asked what my process is for developing the various Pure Commons apps . This comes after I've mentioned a couple of times that I've released a feature I've been working on for months . So I thought I'd write a quick post that explains how I do it, so I can refer people to it if/when they ask in the future. I also find this kind of post interesting, so I'm hoping you do too. If not, feel free to skip this one. 🙃 Using Git without branches Git is a staple in m...

Hello, we have very unusual Friday facts for you. Journey to the physical world Pard It all started in the hot summer of 2024 when we worked really hard to finish the Space Age DLC. The game was almost ready, but we wanted some feedback from our players. A decision was made to organise a playtesting event ( FFF-427 ), where teams of players could play the game from start to finish and provide us with in-person feedback and criticism to deliver the best product you a...

After spending 25 years in defense acquisition, last month marked one year since I joined Shield AI. It feels like an appropriate time to reflect on our work on the U.S. Air Force’s Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) program, what that work reveals about the changing role of software in defense, and how government and industry can meet SECWAR’s call to accelerate delivery of capability to the warfighter. Before I arrived, the Air Force had selected Shield AI to integrate Hivemind mission ...

I've been getting into film photography lately. Read more on the site… I've been getting into film photography lately. Read more on the site… I've been getting into film photography lately. Read more on the site… Read more on the site…

The 59th ACM Symposium on the Theory of Computing takes place in Atlanta next June, part of the Federated Computing Research Conference . I don't usually do announcement posts but we need to talk about the Call for Papers  (deadline November 2) where In light of rapid advances in generative AI and their impact on research and scientific communication, STOC 2027 is experimenting with several new policies intended to encourage high-quality submissions and promote clear and effective communica...

Raspberry Pi added a feature in their firmware that restricts users from swapping RAM chips , sometimes even RAM chips of the same capacity from other Raspberry Pi boards. Apparently there were people buying cheap 1 or 2 gig Pi 5s, soldering in some cheap and sometimes unreliable 8 gig RAM chips, and selling them as new 8 gig Pi 5s . Now I totally understand where Raspberry Pi's coming from. They don't wanna support Pis being sold like this, because flaky RAM and dodgy resellers are a...

Here’s some Rust code: // define a function fn foo (x : i32 , y : i32 ) -> i32 { // body elided } // call it let z = foo ( 5 , 6 ); In programming language jargon, we call x and y parameters and 5 and 6 arguments . Rust does not have many fancy features related to parameters and arguments. But other languages do. For example, here’s a function in Ruby , another language I’ve written a ton of: # its definition in Rails def redirect_to (option...

Aviation came to Denver mainly in the form of mail. Like much of the inland West, the first airfields served a smattering of passenger flights (both expensive and uncomfortable in the 1930s) and a regular schedule of contract mail carriers. Postal Service air mail contracts built many of the nation's major airlines—and its major airports. One of Denver's simple airstrips, Denver Municipal Airport, transformed from a mail stop to a busy airport when Continental Airlines moved its headquarters t...

Oh wow . Việt Nam has my favourite coffee culture in the world now, but Australia is an easy second. He says, as he drinks cold brew from South America . You know what I mean. By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2026-09-25. Oh wow . Việt Nam has my favourite coffee culture in the world now, but Australia is an easy second. He says, as he drinks cold brew from South America . You know what I mean. By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2026-09-25. Oh wow . Việt Nam has my favourite coffee cult...

Rob Bowley is “flipping tables in his head” with anger at the current media coverage of the danger of AI killing us all The risk I’m worried about isn’t a future machine deciding to wipe us out. It’s today’s AI, being wired into everything, carelessly and fast. Cyber attacks have already cost millions of dollars in lost economic output, often without AI being involved at all. Bowley feels the push to slow down AI is distracting us from the problems that are lurking with ...

7:00. Wake up. I recall. Taylor Swift’s new music is out today. I proceed to listen to all four new songs while still in bed, looking up to the ceiling and the sky and toward my cool, warm pillow, eager to do nothing else but appreciate the music. I am sure there will be more to analyse in the songs in the coming hours and days when I have listened to – and read about them – more, but what mattered most to me this morning was spending time with the music. I listened to the new songs on...

For more than fifteen years, LMFAO has been synonymous with party rocking. Today, we need to acknowledge the harm that party rocking has caused. When we released “Party Rock Anthem” in 2011, we believed that everybody wanted to have a good time, and that it was appropriate for us to make them do so. We understand now that this was a misguided assumption. Too often, we measured our success by how hard we had rocked the party without asking whether the party wished to be rocked, or whether e...

“I had the red shoes all along” loosely from The Wizard of Oz Introduction It is not that unusual today to find LLMs connected directly to an execution environment. In most cases, a considerable amount of research into APIs of the LLM service and the host execution environment is required to make this work. The following brief note and transcript of my session with Grok recount a surprisingly simple path to this union in the case of Livelymerge. It was achieved in less than an hour ...

Millions of Large-Language-Model -generated words have been spilled on craftsmanship in this gilded-age of software development . We now have agents to plan how code will be written, agents to write code, agents to review code, agents to orchestrate and dispatch tasks to other more (or less) capable subagents (these heavily subsidized tokens aren’t going to pay for themselves). I’ve been in this game long enough to recognize tooling improvements from software companies at the bleeding e...

Lately I've been playing classic World of Warcraft to get a feel for it and see if I like it before I try and go head-first into WoW Forever fairly blind with some friends. People have told me that World of Warcraft is good, but I haven't personally played it (or really any MMO outside of Final Fantasy 14). I've wanted to see for myself, so I dug in. I've been leveling an undead warlock and recently I've gotten my way to The Barrens. My goal was to kill some planestriders and collect...

Back in June, I gave a keynote at the “Identiverse” conference about app and website authentication with a focus on passkeys. The talk touched on values, useful developments and tips for websites and apps, and an interesting story about open, standards-based collaboration. It borrows some from my earlier talk at FIDO’s Authenticate conference, but it’s tighter and more fun. If you’re interested in what I’ve been up to, give it a watch! YouTube Link Back in June, I gave a keynote...

We create new strings all the time. How quickly can you produce short strings in your programming languge? To create a meaningful string, we convert an integer to a string. In Python, that is str(i) . The loop stores each new string in a small ring buffer of 1024 slots, so that the engine cannot simply discard the work. def from_int ( n ): b = buf for i in range ( n ): b [ i & 1023 ] = str ( i ) In JavaScript (Node.js and Bun), I use String(i...

Mitsui & Co. scored 4.83 out of 5 in OpenWork’s 2026 employee-review ranking. Disco, a semiconductor equipment maker, placed first among large employers in Great Place To Work Japan’s 2026 list. This guide to the best companies to work for in Japan sets four 2026 rankings side by side: staff reviews, workplace surveys, student preference and average pay. National engagement, wage and hiring data follow. Best Companies To Work For In Japan 4.83 Mitsui & Co.’s score in OpenWork’s ...

When someone is explaining something to me, I ask on average one question every thirty seconds. I’m sure this is frustrating to some people, but it’s actually a good habit and you should do it too. Trying to understand Most of the questions I ask are very short, and require very short answers. Typically I’m asking for confirmation: “so when you say X, you mean Y?”, or “this X is the thing you mentioned earlier when you were saying Z?“. The point of these questions is to make su...

Yesterday was Grok 4.7 ( pelicans ) and MiMo v2.6 Flash/Pro ( more pelicans ). Today Anthropic released Claude Opus 5.5 , and around an hour later OpenAI released GPT-6 Sol and GPT-6 Luna . It's going to take a while to get a good read on all of these new models, but here are my impressions so far. GPT-6 Sol and Luna are half the price of their GPT-5.6 equivalents GPT-5.6 Luna was already my favorite model for building applications against, because it combined excellent performance wit...

0.0 Context setting Monday 21 September in Portland, Oregon, where it’s still unseasonably warm. I am also tired. Are you tired? It’s just tiring all over. I am also sore because I am 46 years old and yesterday went roller skating for the second time ever for at a kid birthday party. 0.1 How People Work, Live! Last Friday I had Anna Pickard on which was lovely because she’s the third person I’ve had on with an English accent. We got to talk about words and writing and how to sell ...

Solitaire Alone Together I made a new game. It's called Solitaire Alone Together . It's Windows 98 solitaire, but you can play with everyone else on the internet. Read the full post on my blog! Here's a raw link, if you need it: https://eieio.games/blog/solitaire-alone-together Solitaire Alone Together I made a new game. It's called Solitaire Alone Together . It's Windows 98 solitaire, but you can play with everyone else on the internet. Read the full post on my blog! H...

Joint Indo-US discovery of water and hydroxyl across the Moon’s surface by the Chandrayaan 1 orbiter, prominently highlighted as blue and violet on this reflected infrared radiation map. Individual images: NASA / JPL-Caltech / Brown University / ISRO / TeamIndus | Graphic: Jatan Mehta 17 years ago this week, a paper published in Science announced the discovery of water on the Moon by India’s Chandrayaan 1 orbiter. Changing the notion of a bone-dry Moon as cemented during the Apoll...